Ukulele of Death, page 3
Instead, Brad (as Aunt Margie called him) suggested something that could be a much larger purpose: With his surgical knowledge and her miraculous breakthrough, they could literally create their own life.
This touched a nerve for my mother. She and Dad had very much wanted to have children, but were unable to conceive. They were still fairly young, in their thirties, and had not yet considered adoption. Surely some sort of in vitro procedure could have helped them, but with this new idea, the merging of their own two specialties and their knowledge creating children for them seemed perfect.
Mom hadn’t told Aunt Margie much about the science involved in creating Ken and me. But it had involved an electrical charge, one that we needed to in some way replicate on a regular basis to keep our systems active. We don’t have any metal in our bodies except for the ports, but our hearts need periodic jumpstarts. I know I can feel it – if I don’t plug in every three days or so for about an hour and a half, I get sluggish and my head starts to swim a little. (Ken was now working on ways to reduce the charging time, and swears he will eventually get it down to forty-five minutes or less.)
I’d just never considered the fact that Aunt Margie always made me plug in the day before I’d go to a sleepover, or that none of the other girls needed to connect themselves to a wall socket while we were watching scary movies and eating popcorn. I just figured they’d plugged in a day or so before in anticipation like I had.
Sometimes the depth of my own naiveté can amaze even me.
Aunt Margie said she’d never heard directly from my parents since they’d fled our apartment late one night. Occasionally, she’d receive an envelope in the mail with no return address and carrying various postmarks. The envelopes contained cash but no note.
In the ensuing years, I did a good amount of research. Ken, for the first few years, refused to help; he felt abandoned by our parents, believed that they had left us either because they considered us too much trouble or worse, because they were repulsed by ‘the monsters they’d made.’ After about three years of coaxing from Aunt Margie and me, he had come around to the point that he’d keep an eye out on the internet for what we considered to be suspicious behavior in the science realm that might point to our parents’ whereabouts.
He also made sure to hack into some government agency sites, just to make sure there wouldn’t be an unexpected knock on the door one night looking for people with USB ports and a need for fresh current every now and again.
I discovered the odd article here or there about a scientist doing something unusual with hormones to promote healing, but it was never a woman of the right age. We did, after a while, get a sense of our parents from what Aunt Margie could tell us and from some journals she had been keeping safe for them, which she showed to us.
A lot of it was scientific data I didn’t entirely understand. You’d think given the scientific genius of both my parents, I’d have inherited something, but then one has to remember that my DNA and that of the people who made me might or might not have intersected; we were never clear on that. Ken, however, did understand science, although hardly at the genius level, and was beginning to make some sense out of what they’d done, but it was taking (in my opinion) forever.
Even if we weren’t unlocking the secrets of creating life, through the journals we got to know our parents. Mom was earnest but kind and caring, and Dad, whose entries were much more infrequent, seemed just a little arrogant, but with the sense of mischief and fun that a ten-year-old boy would bring to a new chemistry set. He probably blew up a lot of stuff.
But neither Ken nor I had found a decent trail to our parents, whom Aunt Margie insisted would be back ‘as soon as it’s safe for you.’
Eventually, it was time to move on with our admittedly bizarre lives. Ken went to college, then I went to college, then Ken got out and started working on the docks. I went to grad school, decided to open an agency for people who couldn’t find their parents (if I couldn’t find mine, maybe I could find theirs), talked Ken into being my partner and moving into my apartment one floor up from Aunt Margie (who had moved us out of Queens and into Manhattan years before), to share expenses, and here we were.
Trying to find Evelyn Bannister’s ukulele.
FIVE
The block of West 48th Street in Manhattan between Sixth and Seventh Avenues was once known as ‘Music Row.’ Small specialty shops that catered to working musicians like Manny’s and Rudy’s Music Shop were side by side so players could browse, shoot the breeze, and occasionally jam while looking over instruments almost nobody else could appreciate or afford.
Now the block is just another row of office buildings, the real estate under them far too valuable to have been left to a bunch of crazy musicians anymore. There is a gigantic Sam Ash music superstore there, and some of the employees are actually knowledgeable about guitars, basses, keyboards and drums. If you can corral one long enough to ask a question. The word ‘ukulele’ had gotten me a point to a rack that had exactly two specimens on it (in addition to a couple of mandolins) and a suggestion that maybe I should look for something in a nearby souvenir shop or go to the nearest Target store, which was on 117th Street in East Harlem.
Luckily, there was one holdout from the good old days. Pedro’s Music Emporium, almost literally a hole in the wall now that it was surrounded by enough granite to provide countertop for every home on the planet, had guitars, trombones, sheet music, and triangles (!) hanging in its front window, proudly flouting the trend that had wiped out its neighbors.
The day after Evelyn Bannister told us her probably bogus story, I had spent two hours online researching the Gibson Poinsettia and then gave Pedro’s a visit. I prefer talking to real people. No jokes, please.
Asking for Pedro inside would be stupid – the awning held a banner reading ‘Est. 1925’ – so I walked to the counter, noticed the two tattooed, mohawked, acned boys trying out a bass guitar in the back of the store, and nodded to the guy behind the counter. He was about fifty, bald (not shaved – natural bald), and gawking at me because I was roughly six inches taller than he was.
Besides, I looked really good. Even the mohawked guys in the back were watching. Like they had a chance.
‘How can I help you?’ said the counter guy after he was finished craning his neck. I leaned over on to the counter to give him a break. He unconsciously started looking down my shirt, and I stood up again.
‘I’m wondering about a ukulele,’ I said.
‘Your hands are too big,’ he said without hesitation. ‘You’d never be able to get the chords right.’
Yeah, thanks a lot, buddy. ‘It’s not for me,’ I said. I pulled the PI license out of my purse and showed it to him; he did not so much as raise an eyebrow. That was what I’d expected, but it’s so much faster than telling the guy you’re a detective, having him be skeptical, and then having to produce the license as proof. ‘I’m trying to find a guy who might have owned a rare ukulele.’
That startled him. ‘A rare … ukulele?’ he asked, the concept being something new and alien to him. ‘What kind of rare uke are we talking about?’
My cell phone vibrated, and I checked. The call was from a number I didn’t recognize, so I figured it was a robocall and ignored it. ‘A Gibson Poinsettia, I’m not sure what year. But they don’t make them anymore, and I’m told it’s something of a collector’s item.’
The guy scratched the top of his bald head, then looked me up and down again, and this time I got the impression it wasn’t for fun. ‘They’re sort of rare,’ he told me. ‘But it’s not like it’s worth millions or anything. Sure, there might be a few collectors, maybe one or two here in the city, who would be interested, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in my life, and I doubt the excitement would be too intense.’
I nodded; that was fine. ‘I don’t actually care if I find the ukulele,’ I told him, noticing that the word ‘ukulele’ became more ridiculous every time I said it. ‘I’m trying to track down a guy who’d own one. Do you know any collectors of that sort of thing? It doesn’t just have to be ukes.’ (I tried that one out to see if it was any better, but it wasn’t.) ‘Any stringed instrument. As long as it’s rare.’
‘Wouldn’t want anything well done,’ snarked one of the mohawked kids, and the other laughed and high-fived him. I was more than ten feet away, and could smell pot smoke on them, but then, my sense of smell is a little more developed than most. I ignored them because I’m an adult. And because putting them in the hospital would have been time-consuming. All that paperwork.
The bald guy chewed on his lower lip for a while, which I took to be a sign he was thinking. ‘I don’t have any regulars who are into that sort of thing,’ he said. ‘The collectors in this city, they have real money. Go around picking up a vintage Les Paul from 1951 for like thirty grand or more. A thing like this, I think you’re lookin’ at eBay, to tell you the truth.’
‘I thought this thing was kind of the Holy Grail of ukuleles,’ I said. ‘People aren’t running around looking for them?’
Just so you don’t think I’m stupid: My research into the Gibson Poinsettia had indicated it wasn’t exactly the Maltese Falcon. There were varying reports as to the worth of such an instrument, but none of them was exactly eye-popping. I thought maybe someone at Pedro’s would have an idea as to why Evelyn might be on the trail of one because I was pretty sure that whole story about her long-lost birth father was nonsense.
He shrugged. ‘In Hawaii, maybe. Nobody plays the uke anymore. Nobody cares.’
This was turning out to be the deadest of ends. ‘Just out of curiosity, what’s something like this worth?’ I asked the guy.
He made a ‘who knows?’ face and said, ‘Outer limits, absolutely the most you’ll ever get for it? Maybe ten grand. But it would have to be practically untouched and sealed up since the day it was made. Maybe autographed by Don Ho.’
That was about what I’d expected, and ten thousand dollars wasn’t exactly life-changing money for anyone but the completely indigent. ‘Nice, but not worth traipsing all over searching for it,’ I thought aloud.
‘Unless you’re a collector,’ the guy said. ‘Real aficionados will go to any lengths to get a rare item they want. I had a guy once flew in from Amsterdam to get a Rickenbacker violin bass that he was sure Paul McCartney played on “A Hard Day’s Night.” He didn’t – Paul – but you couldn’t convince the guy of that. Paid forty thousand for it.’
‘You charged the guy forty grand and you knew it wasn’t McCartney’s?’ one of the tattooed boys in the back asked.
The counter guy shrugged again. ‘Not my fault he wanted to spend all that money. If it was autographed, he’d probably have paid a hundred.’
‘You should have signed it,’ one of the kids said. The other hooted at his rapier wit. I felt a growl in the back of my throat, but didn’t voice it.
This wasn’t getting me anywhere, but now I felt bad that I’d wasted the counter guy’s time. I looked around the store. There must be something I could buy that wouldn’t be so cheap as to be insulting (guitar picks were out of the question) but not so expensive that I couldn’t make the rent the following month.
I don’t actually play an instrument, which was something of an impediment. But Ken does.
‘Do you have violin strings?’ I asked. I wasn’t sure how often he had to restring his Cremona, but hey, the date we called his birthday was coming up. I knew it was a Cremona because it said so on the case.
‘Sure,’ the counter guy said, but the two wise guys in the back were snickering anew.
‘Violin strings?’ the taller one, who was probably fifteen minutes closer than his buddy to getting a girlfriend, but that still put him at ten years off, sneered. ‘Are we playing at the symphony tonight?’ he asked in a bad upper-crust accent.
The counter guy ignored them. ‘What kind do you want?’ he asked me.
‘Kind? There are kinds?’ I should have just gotten a piece of sheet music and been done with it. This would teach me to try and do something for my brother.
‘Sure,’ counter guy answered as the two skinny dweebs in the back dissolved into hysterics. ‘Depends on what kind of violin you play, is it classical or bluegrass fiddle? Do you want gut strings or steel-centered? You’ve got a bunch of gauges … There’s a lot of different choices with strings.’
‘Maybe she should play some Beethoven for you and you can figure it out,’ the shorter little pain in the butt said. ‘Violin!’
I smiled politely at the counter guy. ‘Excuse me a moment, please,’ I said. He had a suspicious look on his face, but nodded. I walked to the back of the store, where the two tattooed fans of Anthrax (according to one’s T-shirt, which his mother had probably ironed) were still laughing loudly.
There was no point in trying to reason with them. I grabbed each by the front of the black faded T-shirt, lifted them up one on each arm and watched their legs dangle a foot off the ground. Both their respiration and heart rates skyrocketed.
‘Don’t disrespect classical music,’ I said calmly, and without any exertion in my voice. ‘You know, Slash is a big fan of Mozart.’ I had no idea if that was true, but it certainly could be. ‘Are you going to buy anything from this nice man?’
The taller one, whom I could feel trembling in my hand, said, ‘No, we’re just here looking.’
‘Go look outside and don’t waste his time,’ I said. ‘He’s trying to make a living.’
The two boys looked suitably impressed, and said nothing. I let them down to the floor again, did not wait to hear their responses. As soon as their feet hit the ground and my hands left their shirts, they were out the front door. I walked back to the counter and put down one of my business cards. ‘In case you hear anything,’ I said.
The guy stared at me. ‘Sure.’
‘Maybe I should just make it a gift card,’ I said.
SIX
‘I think I’ve got something,’ Ken said even before I could get my jacket off when I returned to the apartment. He was sitting at what we laughingly called the ‘dining room table,’ which was simply a door we’d put up on cinderblocks in the middle of the space next to the kitchen.
‘What kind of something?’ I asked, kicking off my boots and flopping into the armchair we’d hauled over from his old apartment.
‘Something about the way we were put together,’ he said, pointing at the screen of his laptop like I could see it from where I was sitting.
I sat up; we didn’t get breakthroughs often. ‘What?’ I asked.
‘It’s not about where Mom and Dad might be; it’s too old for that.’ We knew that our parents tended to move around a lot. ‘It’s a clip from over three years ago. But it refers to a pair of scientists who managed to grow a human ear on the back of a lab rat.’
I stood up and walked to him so I could peruse the screen, but I wasn’t excited. ‘That’s not new,’ I said. ‘That’s been going on for years. They’re hoping to grow a liver. Organs for transplants that wouldn’t be rejected. That sort of thing.’
‘Yeah, but this is different. After they talk about how some people are up in arms about the ear, they refer in passing to an experiment some unnamed scientists did. And in that one, they grew a whole arm, and they did it with nothing but DNA from a sample of saliva.’
OK, that was different. Before, any time we’d heard of experiments in which some organ was generated artificially, it had been done beginning with something from a donor, like a piece of a liver or a kidney someone didn’t need. This report, if it was true, could point to a breakthrough we’d never heard of before.
‘But that’s not what happened with us,’ I pointed out.
‘We don’t know that. Maybe we’ve been going in the wrong direction.’ Ken gave me a significant look. If our parents were able to create organs from something as small as a cheek swab, our creation could have been considerably simpler than we’d assumed.
‘You mean maybe we were grown rather than stitched together?’
He tilted his head: Sort of. ‘I mean, what if our organs, at least, were grown from tiny bits of DNA? We might not be as different as we think.’
‘Other people don’t have to plug in,’ I reminded him.
‘I’m not saying we’re normal,’ he scoffed. He closed his laptop and shook his head. ‘OK. What did you find out?’
Ugh. I went back and slouched into the chair again. ‘A grand total of not much. This ukulele is valuable compared to the cheap ones with plastic strings you can buy at Walmart, but it’s not exactly what you’d call the holy grail. The guy at the music store didn’t know anybody who collects them. I don’t see how it’s going to lead us to Evelyn Bannister’s father.’
Ken rubbed his eyes, which he thinks makes him look thoughtful, when in fact it makes him look like he has red eyes. ‘Let’s forget the ukulele,’ he said. ‘What do we know about the father?’
‘What have you found out about the mother?’ I asked in retaliation.
‘I’ll get to it later.’
I waved a hand. ‘We, meaning I, know he grew up in Nashua, New Hampshire and then moved here to work on Wall Street, made himself some money and didn’t check in on his daughter.’
‘They put her up for adoption,’ Ken said, as he had many times before. ‘In most cases, the whole idea is that the parents aren’t ready to raise a child.’
‘Like ours?’
He forced eye contact. ‘Never use us as examples of anything.’
That made me angry, but seeing as how it made sense, I didn’t respond. I just sat in the chair – which really needed to be sprayed for bedbugs, I’d guess – and stewed. Neither of us said anything for a while. Ken opened up his laptop again and started … doing something.
